SME Times News Bureau | 18 Feb, 2012
Nordic carrier Finnair, whose cabin crew performed an inflight dance, as a treat for Indian guests on Jan 26 (Indian Republic Day), reported a surge of 25 percent of advance booking on its Delhi-Helsinki flights, post the promotional initiative, said an official in New Delhi on Saturday.

"In a short time, the advance bookings on Finnair went up by about 25 percent," said Kari Stolbow, director, Indian Subcontinent for Finnair.

"This has also created a huge amount of goodwill for Finnair in India and all over the world," said Stolbow.

The surge in bookings comes after the promotional initiative of inflight dance, which was carried out by 24 cabin crew members of Finnair on a famous Bollywood number, before the flight took off from Helsinki airport to New Delhi on Jan 26, 2012.

The cabin crew, dressed in glittering Indian clothes danced to the song "Deewangi Deewangi" from the film "Om-Shanti-Om".

The entire sequence was conceived and choreographed by Finnair's flight attendants and lasted for about three minutes which surprised the passengers, who actively participated in the event.

"The take-off to Bollywood was a planned friendly salute to India and was an expression of our appreciation of our Indian passengers," said Helena Kaartinen, Finnair personnel, who was involved in the event.

"With this kind of unbelievable feedback that we have got, our team has got the smile glued on our faces even after several days," she said.

The event was widely covered by global media and social networking website Youtube, receiving around 4.5 million views.

The carrier, which serves 11 Asian destinations, will deploy modern fleet, with an average age of not more than one-year on its New Delhi flight, which has a frequency of six operations per week.